Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
00:56:12 · Micky Malka
So the more nodes, the better. So we're starting with node one with the idea that will be more of them. But there's three concepts. One, exhibition. How do you make people feel about this? Museums are not wired to show digital art. This doesn't... This is not supposed to be on screens on the walls. It's supposed to be alive. It's supposed to feel immersive. It's supposed to feel like you're walking through the story of the art. You don't need a small letterhead of 10 lines telling you what the artist meant or a QR code to take a photo. You don't need that. You need something very different. So people want something very different. So we had to design a space from scratch that allowed for that creativity. And what better place than Palo Alto? Why? It's where computers got started. It's where Steve Jobs started the first Apple store a block away from Node. And we... I remember seeing him going to the store every day for the first year, tweaking how things were shown, how things were presented in the store because that was a place where they they started, they designed the store here. And then they took it. And then it became a node network of itself with the Apple Stores. So we're trying to replicate. We're no Steve Jobs. We're not Apple. But we're trying to replicate that sensation, that feeling.
00:57:34 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:57:34] S0: It's also super interesting choice of location because, obviously, there's there's Stanford there. There's all of the technologists, and none of them actually own digital art. There's very few of these guys who built this whole digital world own any of this stuff. It's weird. [00:57:51] S1: That's correct. It's very weird. And I think it's gonna grow on them. And I think when... Once they see it, they cannot unsee it. They connect with it really fast. We've been... At our home, we have been exhibiting digital art and physical art together. You can see how digital art attracts everybody young. And they get embedded in it and they get absorbed by it, and they ask questions, and they wanna come back and see it again. So you can see this is gonna happen. It's just... It hasn't been their place. You don't expect a techie guy to go to the museum and walk for two hours and find one piece in a l e... LED screen this size on a wall. That's not gonna make the connection to them.
00:57:51 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:57:51] S1: That's correct. It's very weird. And I think it's gonna grow on them. And I think when... Once they see it, they cannot unsee it. They connect with it really fast. We've been... At our home, we have been exhibiting digital art and physical art together. You can see how digital art attracts everybody young. And they get embedded in it and they get absorbed by it, and they ask questions, and they wanna come back and see it again. So you can see this is gonna happen. It's just... It hasn't been their place. You don't expect a techie guy to go to the museum and walk for two hours and find one piece in a l e... LED screen this size on a wall. That's not gonna make the connection to them. [00:58:31] S0: It's also interesting to see the collector base change as well. We're starting to see... There's very little trading goes on now. It's just a it's just a bunch of collectors coming into the space and trying to build serious collections. I think the whole space has changed. A lot of people don't understand this. When I I mentioned I was at some family office event in LA, and talking about it, NFTs, they're like, oh my god. That was awful. I'm like, you don't understand what's happening. It's like, there are serious collections being built, serious relationships with artists, and it's less financialization and more the traditional art curation and collection that's happening.
00:58:31 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:58:31] S0: It's also interesting to see the collector base change as well. We're starting to see... There's very little trading goes on now. It's just a it's just a bunch of collectors coming into the space and trying to build serious collections. I think the whole space has changed. A lot of people don't understand this. When I I mentioned I was at some family office event in LA, and talking about it, NFTs, they're like, oh my god. That was awful. I'm like, you don't understand what's happening. It's like, there are serious collections being built, serious relationships with artists, and it's less financialization and more the traditional art curation and collection that's happening. [00:59:11] S1: I agree with you. I think we're we're just starting the storytelling phase. And and even the artists are getting more comfortable telling their story because they were the first entrepreneurs. This is like the first entrepreneurs that started the Internet. They're not... They just saw technology in a way that no one else understood it. They saw the future way, way before. And now you're starting to see how they're getting comfortable telling the stories, sharing how this has happened. And on top of that, there's a whole generation of new artists that you've met and I'm meeting that are just special also. Because for them, it's like there's no other way. There's no turning back. They didn't even train on on the old mediums. They went straight to these new mediums.
00:59:11 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:59:11] S1: I agree with you. I think we're we're just starting the storytelling phase. And and even the artists are getting more comfortable telling their story because they were the first entrepreneurs. This is like the first entrepreneurs that started the Internet. They're not... They just saw technology in a way that no one else understood it. They saw the future way, way before. And now you're starting to see how they're getting comfortable telling the stories, sharing how this has happened. And on top of that, there's a whole generation of new artists that you've met and I'm meeting that are just special also. Because for them, it's like there's no other way. There's no turning back. They didn't even train on on the old mediums. They went straight to these new mediums. [00:59:52] S0: And I think it's gonna push mediums even further. You and I were talking about, you know, hologram as a [00:59:58] S1: Holograms.
00:59:58 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:59:58] S1: Holograms. [00:59:59] S0: Yeah. All of this... And the artists are pushing it, really, because they're pushing technology. I mean, they were using AI that there's so much interesting stuff going on because the the forefront... And I've... How I've split my own collecting is cultural stuff, which is the commenting of what's going on in society. Or there's the cutting edge stuff, which is like, here's some incredible things that are happening. You know, I always refer to the Kim Asendorf pixel decks because it's like Yes. It's unbelievable as a concept where every single pixel is a token in its own right. There's something in that, which is something about what you're talking about, that everything is a token, that there's really interesting statement.